i? THE -;- , ,It . i....'v . . -: ::: = 11' /;,\, . II ... II /' L' ._--- _ :: II.:: mï. <1\\\\\ .. e -, .' 0 0 . · 0 . -" . ","- THE TALK OF THE, TOWN Notes and Comment W E can't imagine a better way to salute the promise of the new year than by telling you about an old friend of ours, Sidney Roby, of Orchard Road, BerlIn, Connecticut. We never think of Sidney without thinking of his address, because he is a subscriber to the magazine and for twenty-odd years now has directed his renewal notice and personal check to us, for forwarding to the subscription department. Sidnev isn't much of a hand at letters, and we don't hear from him except when his subscription is about to run out; we suspect that he uses this little business transãction as a means of saying hello to us without the D 1,- /--, '- ' L ''-L. í) '-" " trouble of writing "hello" and wIthout the sinful expenditure of another four- cent stamp to confirm, by mail, a friend- ship that he knows will survive any amount of silence. Sidney is a Yankee, and thrifty of both energy and cash. ("Killing two birds with one stone" is a favorite apothegm up around Berlin, and so is "A penny saved is a penny earned.") Nevertheless, In any dealings with Yankees it's a mistake to assume that there are only motives like these behind the things they ào. When Sidney Roby, of Orchard Road, Berlin, Con- necticut, sends us his renewal, the chances are that he isn't just saying hello and saving money; he's probably also in- dicatIng that he continues to have a cer- tain confidence in our ability to turn out a magazine. "You see, I still believe in you" is one way to read Sidney's gesture. Or, to take a somewhat gloomier view, he ma} be warning us that we'd better keep on our toes-that, for sufficient financial reasons, we mustn't let him down. "Seven dollars a year! " he may be saying. "You people in New York seem to think money grows on trees!" Sidne} 's subscription always runs out shortly after Christmas. His neatly filled-in renewal blank has just reached our desk, and in it we find a fresh am- biguity to ponder. In the past, he has chosen to subscribe for a single year; this time he's opting-plunging-for two vears. Added confidence in us? It may be that, but we like to think that it stands for added confidence in himself as well. After so long, Sidney has ap- parently decided that we and he are both good for at least a couple of years more. This decision is remarkable not so much because of the magazine's age as be- cause of Sidney's. For Sidney isn't mere- ly an old friend of ours; he's actually the oldest person we know. In a few weeks, he'll be a hundred and four. When we telephoned him in Berlin the other day to check up on his birth date-Fehruary 14, 1857, he told us-we found him in excellent voice, as usual, but distressed at our extravagance in callIng him from so far away. "Thought it might be bad news," he said. "Nobody around here uses long-dIstance except for bad news" We congratulated Sidney on his forthcoming birthday, and a"ked if longevity ran in the family. "F ather died at ninety-six," he said. "Mother went at ninety-two, but it was cancer that did it-no telling how long she might have lasted otherwise. Oldest any- body in our family ever got, before me:J was a great-uncle of mine He was born back around the turn of the century- the nIneteenth century, that is-and lived to celebrate, at nearly a hundred, his fiftieth wedding anniversary with his third wife." When Sidney himself \vaS born, Pierce was in. the White House, the country consisted of thirty-one states, with a total population of 23,- 191,876, and there were people alive who had known \Vashjngton, Kant, Mozart, and other eighteenth-century giants Sidney's great-grandchildren will live far past the year 2000, which is to say that Sidney has contrived to bridge the eIghteenth, nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centunes. \Ve started to speculate on this prodigious span of time, but Sidney cut us off. "Land! " he said. "This is costing you money. Things don't change as much as you young folks think they do. The sooner you hang up, the sooner we can both get back to work. Time and tide wait for no man." Our salute, then, on the first day of 1961, to Sidney Roby, of Orchard Road, Berlin, Connecticut, old friend, loyal subscriber, impatient bridger of centuries. We'll do our best to please him for the next two years. Tznkerers A MATEUR scientists form a little- known but not unimportant sub- culture in American society. Their spokesman is Mr. C. L. Stung, and the accepted forum for their ideas IS Mr. Stong's column, "The Amateur Scientist," which has appeared monthly since 1 952 in the pages of that admirable magazine Scientific American. Simon & Schuster has recently puhlished a hook derived from Mr Stong's col- umn; with a matter-of-factness char- acteristic of him and his fellow-amateurs and uncharacteristIc of most contempo- rary book titles, it's called "The S C'len- tific il merican Book of Projects for the Amateur Scientist." You know exactly what you're getting-and getting in frr[J ..., - ... =,- _ r.- for-when you buy that book, and you know exactly where you are when you talk with its author, as we've just been privileged to do. A fifty-eight-year-old natIve son of Iowa, M r. Stong has